When I first designed the site’s pages we had a small percentage of the survey responses we now have. So I didn’t do anything fancy, and simply displayed all of the data for a model on some pages.

As data have accumulated, these pages have gotten longer and longer, and slower and slower to load. Lately the repair history pages for popular car models like the BMW 3-Series and Honda Accord have taken over three minutes to load, which is far beyond acceptable.

So I found some time the other night (until 4:20AM) to break up the repair history pages by model year. The resulting pages are a much more practical size and load much faster–just a few seconds for most, and about 16 seconds for the worst.

Even the first day’s response was unexpectedly strong. Visits to these pages nearly doubled and the percentage of people who “bounced” away immediately after landing on these pages plummeted (a good thing).

So, time to break up the entire site into smaller, more manageable chunks?